Poll

A powwow is a powwow, in New York City or anyplace. At Floyd Bennett Field, in southeast Brooklyn, the open ground stretches far enough in all directions that you can forget you are anywhere in particular. The sound of Native American drumming and singing takes the huge space back to what it used to be; native drums sound insistent and powerful up close, wild and glorious from far away. White clouds lined up in an orderly pattern across the plain blue sky on a recent Saturday afternoon as the twentieth annual Gateway to Nations Pow Wow went on below them. Dancers in many styles, from traditional to fancy to jingle dress, entered the grassy circle between the main tent and a large, shade-providing tree. Then they jumped and stepped and jingled and bobbed and wove in a visual array that combined natural fur and feathers with the colors of every crayon in the box.

Among the thousands in attendance, just about everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about the name of Washington, D.C.,’s professional football franchise. “I like it,” a Navajo jeweller from Winslow, Arizona, said. “The Redskins have always been the Redskins. I mean, what else are you going to call them? The Washington Bobcats? I think it’s O.K. as long as you don’t downgrade it. That ‘woo-woo-woo’ stuff, hitting the hand to the mouth. That’s not good. You’re not supposed to hit your face with your hand, because your face is your image. The Creator gave your image to you, so you respect that.”

“I love football and I love the Redskins’ uniforms,” Edwina Tosa Tortalita, a Jemez Pueblo potter from New Mexico, said. “But the name is helping the football team make billions, so they should give back to native peoples. We are rich in culture, but moneywise we’re poor.”

During a break in the dancing, a handler of birds of prey flew hawks and falcons around the dance circle and told facts about them. For example, falcons have stiff wings and fly at more than two hundred miles an hour and sever their prey’s spinal cord in a single snip, but they don’t like to fight, because they are in trouble if they break a feather. The handler, whose name was Ray Peña, sent a falcon swooping across a section of bleachers, just a few feet above the heads of the audience, like a special effect in a movie, only cooler. Then he summoned the falcon to his gloved fist and fed her a piece of freshly defrosted chicken.

“Oh, c’mon—you’re going to use a name that refers to the color of someone’s skin? That’s ridiculous,” said Cliff Matias, the cultural director of the Redhawk Native American Arts Council, of Sunset Park, Brooklyn, which organized and sponsored the powwow. Matias is part Taíno and part Quechua; the first is a large Puerto Rican tribe, the second is Peruvian. “The team’s owner says he’s ‘honoring’ us. A lot of us say we’re offended. Is it still ‘honoring’ if the people you say you’re honoring tell you that they’re offended?”

“The name really don’t bother me,” a young dancer said. “But when I see someone wearing a war bonnet for a decoration or like it’s a joke, that does make me mad.” Matias noted that war bonnets have special meaning, and that no dancer today would be wearing one.

“How would you like it if I called you a whiteskin?” Sherry Pocknett, a Wampanoag from Mashpee, Massachusetts, asked a person who asked about the name. “The Massachusetts Whiteskins—would that be a better name for the Patriots?” She scooped a portion of squash onto a plastic plate at her booth, the Sly Fox’s Den, which featured Wampanoag cooking. She is a caterer who travels as far as Florida serving native specialties such as venison and onions, corn cakes, and snapping-turtle soup.

The smell of Indian fry bread travelled on the breeze, the drums beat, the voices rose and fell, the horse trailers sat on the overgrown runways. After a dance was over, a tall Indian in full regalia left the circle, came to the orange plastic fence at the edge of the powwow field, raised one knee, stomped the fence to the ground in a single motion with a jingle of ankle bells, stepped across it, walked to a nearby car, popped the trunk, and began to remove his gear. Nearby, a baby in a car carrier slept under an awning in the shade. ♦

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